You’d Need 65M Tweets to Fill the Grand Canyon

This infographic by Rackspace puts the quantities of the data we use in a pretty entertaining real-world perspective, and demonstrates the main driver behind the booming personal cloud management trend fairly well. After Memolane timelined your social history, and DEMO Spring 2011 introduced half a dozen new personal cloud centralization products, you can start measuring your tweets.

Jumping straight to business, 65 million daily tweets account for around 9GB – which could easily fill up Grand Canyon in one day if one byte would be a square millimeter. Browsing over to Flickr, if each of the 5 billion photos it stores stands at an average of 5Mb that would equal to around 14 petabytes, or 6 million 4GB digital cameras. Networking behemoth Facebook is also getting its fair share of pictures – 60 petabytes worth, which would be enough to fill up the Gulf of Mexico if one bye would equal 10 gallons.

The human brain can hold up to 10 terabytes of data, or about 32 Playstations-worth. 10TB is also the amount of video uploaded to YouTube each day, and equals 405 Blue-ray disks. Texting is not left behind either with 22TB worth of messages sent each month. 425TB worth of apps are being downloaded every day, and this figure is dwarfed compared to the 3.6 zetabytes (or 10 billion 10GB cloud servers) a U.S household consumes every year. Speaking of some big data, humankind stores 30x of all the insects on Earth to date – roughly 295 exabytes. Wowzers!